Vienna's Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity Beyond the Nation-State

ISBN-13: 9781441170217 / Angielski / Miękka / 2015 / 344 str.

Katherine Arens

Opis

Vienna's Dreams of Europe puts forward a convincing counter-narrative to the prevailing story of Austria's place in Europe since the Enlightenment. For a millennium, Austrian writers have used images of Europe and its hegemonic culture as their political and cultural reference points. Yet in discussions of Europe's nation-states, Austria appears only as an afterthought, no matter that its precursor states-the Holy Roman Empire, the Austrian Empire, and Austria Hungary-represented a globalized European cultural space outside the dominant paradigm of nationalist colonialism. Austrian writers today confront reunited Europe in full acknowledgment of Austro-Hungary's multicultural heritage, which mixes various nationalities, ethnicities, and cultural forms, including ancestors from the Balkans and beyond.Challenging standard accounts of 18th- through 20th-century European imperial identity construction, Vienna's Dreams of Europe introduces a group of Austrian public intellectuals and authors who have since the 18th century construed their own public as European. Working in different terms than today's theorist-critics of the hegemonic West, Katherine Arens posits a political identity resisting two hundred years of European nationalism.

Recenzje

Vienna's Dreams of Europe is a critique of familiar teleological readings of modern history, an attempt to provide a more nuanced understanding of regional public institutions and public spaces in Central Europe, and an exploration of distinctively Austrian approaches to the idea of Europe. Arens brings to cultural studies-and to German studies in particular-a complex picture of European history and culture, which challenges common assumptions about modern Europe since the eighteenth century, especially "the fiction of an emerging 'German' culture-nation." David Luft, Professor of History, Oregon State University, USA

Spis treści

Introduction: Austria as a Challenge to EuropeSection 1: An Austrian Imperial Europe Chapter 1: Letters to the Ruling Class: The Public Spaces of EnlightenmentChapter 2: Extending Europe's Enlightenment: Why Grillparzer Resists Weimar Chapter 3: Revolution from the Prompter's Box: Rewriting Public Dreams of Political MoralityChapter 4: Eclipses, Floods, and Biedermeier Catastrophes: Public Spaces in extremis Section 2: At the Margins of Europe, In the Heart of EuropeChapter 5: Hofmannsthal's European Revolution: Recapturing a Space for Common Culture Chapter 6: Schnitzer and the Space of Public Discourse: The Politics of Decadence in Fin de siècle ViennaChapter 7: Kasperl and the Wiener Gruppe: artmann, Bayer and Handke Chapter 8: A New Balkan Challenge: The Reemergence of Austria's EuropeAfterword: Austria as Europe?: The Art and Science of the Post-National CultureBibliographyIndex

O autorze

Katherine Arens is Professor of Germanic Studies, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published widely on comparative Austrian/German intellectual and cultural histories, most recently Vienna's Dreams of Europe and Belle Necropolis: Ghosts of Imperial Vienna (both 2015), and The Other Kant: Experiments in Embodied Knowledge (with Carlos Amador, forthcoming). She has been the recipient of a number of awards, including the Plato Award from the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, UK.